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organizations by geographical location or ideological orientation but based on color it is impossible to consider the showing of the PKK flag to be a “single” offense. I claim the flag to be part of a color scheme, of an abstraction that is created by the organization of all flags together. To take out one flag means to destroy the abstraction that is key to the work as an installation. It would mean one would destroy my artwork. Yet, for the invited organizations the “truth” of their flags does not diminish because they are organized by color. These two realities, artistic and political, exist simultaneously: the flags are abstract, and they are the total opposite of abstraction at the same time. These two realities do not deny each other: they exist as a consequence of one another. Philosopher Vincent van Gerven Oei rearticulated the concept of art’s “relative autonomy” in the context of the New World Summit as art’s “relative illegality.” It is this constructive “state of exception” within a juridical framework that can become an important political tool for people that have been subjected to that other “state of exception”: the one that has placed the organizations “outside” of democratism by help of the international terrorist lists. As such, art’s relative illegality may create new forms of public domain, in which new histories may manifest itself – those many histories that have been suppressed from democratism’s consciousness through the international terrorist lists. These are the histories according to the resistance. The true cynic might say that the organizations that spoke during the summit were merely “staged” within an artistic contexts, as some type of political objet trouvé, a curiosity. I will answer this cynicism with a concrete example from the summit. When one of the speakers at the New World Summit, Luis Jalandoni, who spoke on behalf of the Communist Party of the Philippines and its armed wing, the New People’s Army, took the floor and said “I’m Luis Jalandoni, and that’s my flag” while pointing to the other side of the room, there was no doubt that for him this space was not political despite the presence of art but that it was political exactly because of art. The space became a political space not simply because I labeled it as such, but because the speakers together with me demanded it to be so. If anything, these organizations were educating us through the urgency with which they brought politics back to the theater. Not as a mere simulacrum of politics in the negative sense of the word, but as the rightful place to speak of the meaning of the concept of representation: to ask the core questions that have made the theater and the politics each other’s ideal birthplace. News on upcoming editions of the New World Summit, the New World Summit Bureau and the New World Summit Academy for Cultural Activism
http://www.newworldsummit.eu This text is an adapted version of a lecture given at the second part of the 3rd Former West Research Congress at the Utrecht School of the Arts, Utrecht (NL)